Some debates never seem to die in India. One such is ending the death penalty. The execution of Yakub Memon, convicted of aiding in the 1993 Bombay blasts, after dramatic eleventh-hour efforts to stall the hanging failed in the Supreme Court of India, has reignited the debate on capital punishment and the robustness and integrity of the country’s legal system to deal with life and death issues.
The voices calling for an end to the death penalty are, perhaps, more passionate now and despite being in a minority they have not been drowned out by those baying for blood. These are legion, of course, coming as they do from the screaming pulpits of TV anchors who, like the vestal virgins of ancient Rome, gave the thumbs down to the convicted man even before the Supreme Court had given its opinion, to the right-wing lobby which maintained that justice would not be served unless Memon was given the ultimate punishment.
National security adviser Ajit Doval said from a public platform that such action was in the “larger interest of the nation” and must prevail. Rejecting the notion that state-sponsored killings diminish us all, Doval said that “there is something which is in public interest, in the larger interests of the nation and of generations of Indians yet to take birth.”
Such sentiments go down well in the communally charged air in the country which has been whipped up by some parties portraying members of the minority community as being prone to terrorism acts. So, the thinking goes, not only should such criminals be done away with — the eye for an eye argument — but in such cases justice has to take into account the sentiments of an outraged public that can only be satisfied if the criminal who has harmed society is put to death. Hence, the invoking of “the collective conscience of the society” by the Supreme Court when it awarded the death penalty to Afzal Guru in the Parliament attack case. Guru was hanged in 2013.
But India so far has not been a country that has shown an indecent haste in executing convicts although around 477 languish on death row. The Yakub Memon execution is only the third since 2004 when Dhananjoy Chatterjee was executed for the rape and murder of a young girl. It is the arbitrary nature of justice that is causing deep disquiet.
Uncomfortable facts have come to light. The Death Penalty Research Project of the National Law University, Delhi, has revealed that it is the most disempowered segments of society, the dalits, who are the lowest of the low in India’s hateful caste system, and religious minorities, primarily Muslims, who get the short end of the stick. An overwhelming majority of the 477 prisoners on death row who the researchers interviewed turned out to be from the communities of dalits, tribals, Muslims and OBCs (Other Backward Class). Worse, there was a near-total absence of direct evidence in the majority of the cases and conviction was based on confessions of the accused extracted through torture.
The most chilling finding of the project which has yet to get wide play in public discourse is that as much as 93.5 per cent of those sentenced to death for terror offences are dalits or religious minorities. These are not the issues that the government is addressing as the debate on the death penalty gathers heat.
The last three hangings are said to reflect the regional response to terrorism and sexual violence. There is dismaying evidence of the emerging popularity of the death penalty in the public mind, especially with governments insisting that it is the only deterrence to terrorism acts. In Pakistan, rights activists say over 180 people have been sent to the gallows since it lifted the moratorium on the death penalty in December in the wake of the Peshawar school massacre but few among these are reported to be terrorists.
For India, the Yakub hanging will not bring closure to the 1993 attack because of the uncomfortable questions that it has left hanging. The primary issue is the arbitrary nature of the justice that is meted out in the country and the very definition of terror. Yakub was found guilty of conspiracy, disbursing funds for terrorist acts and possessing arms and ammunition. Yet, while he got the death penalty, all the co-accused were let off with light jail terms for the same offence, making it impossible not to conclude that justice was far from even-handed.
And what constitutes terror? A year before Yakub was hanged, the Gujarat high court freed Maya Kodnani, a former minister who was serving a 28-year jail term for instigating the barbaric 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad in which 97 people were killed, on grounds of illness. It also suspended her sentence. Such discriminatory justice sits ill with the collective conscience of a nation.
The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi
By arrangement with Dawn
